Other Resources

Findings

D. Agencies and Departments of the U.S. Government performed with varying degrees of competency in the fulfillment of their duties; President John F. Kennedy did not receive adequate protection; a thorough and reliable investigation into the responsibility of Lee Harvey Oswald for the assassination was conducted;
the investigation into the possibility of conspiracy in the assassination was inadequate; the conclusions of the investigations were arrived at in good faith, but presented in a fashion that was too definitive

The assassination of President Kennedy was the first and only such crime since
the Secret Service was assigned responsibility for full-time protection of the
President in 1901, as a result of the assassination of William McKinley.(1)
When originally formed in 1865, the Secret Service had not been given responsibility
for Presidential protection, even though that was the year Lincoln was murdered.
(2) Its primary purpose was to deal with counterfeiting, which had become
a national outrage in the period before 1862 when a standardized national currency
was adopted. (3) By the end of the 1860's, the new agency had all but
eliminated the problem. (4)

For the balance of the 19th century, the Secret Service engaged in
various criminal detection activities. It investigated the Ku Klux Klan
in the 1870's (5) Spanish espionage in the 1890's(6) organized crime
in New York City in the 1880's and 1890's (7) and syndicated gambling
in Louisiana at the turn of the century. (8)

Even with the assignment of Presidential protection as its primary
purpose, the Secret Service was not always given the necessary annual
appropriations to carry out the task. (9) It was not until 1908 that
the agency's mission was better defined (10) and, at that, for an ironic
reason. When the Secret Service exposed the participation in land
fraud schemes by Members of Congress from several Western States,
legislation was passed restricting the operations of the Agency and
creating a new Federal law enforcement body that ultimately would
become the Federal Bureau of Investigation. (11) Indeed, the original
FBI men were eight agents transferred from the Secret Service. (12)

The law left the Secret Service with two concerns:
Treasury matters, or counterfeiting, and protection of the President. (13) On
occasion, however, it was given special assignments. During World War I,
the Agency was concerned with German saboteurs, (14) and in 1921 it
investigated the roles of Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall and
Atty. Gen. Harry M. Daugherty in the Teapot Dome Scandal.(15)
From about 1930 on, however, the Secret Service was an
anticounterfeiting agency with file additional assignment of protecting
the President. In its protective role, on only two occasions before
November 22, 1963, was it tested by an actual assault on a President.

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In February 1932, the car in which President Roosevelt was riding
was fired on in Miami, killing the mayor of Chicago, Anton Cermak. (16)
In November 1950, members of the Puerto Rican Nationalist
Party tried to force their way into Blair House, the temporary
home of president Truman.(17)

(a) The Secret Service possessed information that was not properly
analyzed, investigated, or used by the Secret Service in connection
with the president's trip to Dallas; in addition, Secret Service agents
in the motorcade were inadequately prepared to protect the president from a sniper.

President Kennedy posed a problem for the Secret Service from
the start. As a policymaker, he was liberal and innovative, startlingly
so in comparison with the cautious approach of President Eisenhower.(18)
His personal style was known to cause agents assigned to
him deep concern. He traveled more frequently than any of his predecessors,
and he relished contact with crowds of well-wishers. He
scoffed at many of the measures designed to protect him and treated
the danger of assault philosophically.(19) If someone wanted to kill
him, he reasoned, it would be very difficult to prevent.(20) Commenting
on the relationship between the President and the Secret Service,
Presidential Assistant Kenneth O'Donnell told Gerald Behn, Special
Agent-in-Charge of the White House detail, "Politics and protection
don't mix."(21)

The core of the Presidential security arm of the Secret Service is
the White House Detail, which in 1963 was composed of 36 special
agents.(22) In addition, there were six special agent-drivers, eight
special agents assigned to the Kennedy family and five special officers
detailed to the Kennedy home in Hyannisport, Mass. On the trip to
Texas, there were 28 special agents in the Presidential entourage.(23)

In all, out of 552 employees in November 1963, there were 70 special
agents and 8 clerks--or 14 percent of the total Secret Service work
force--assigned to protect the President and vice President directly
or to the Protective Research Section, a preventive intelligence division
charged with gathering and evaluating threat information and
seeing that it is usefully disseminated.(24) In addition, there were 30
employees in the office of the Chief of the Secret Service, plus 313
agents and 131 clerks in 66 field offices, all of whom were on call to
assist in presidential protection.(25)

The time when the most manpower was needed in 1963 (as it was in
1978) was when the President traveled and was exposed to crowds of
people in open spaces. On such occasions, the Secret Service called on
municipal, county, and State law enforcement agencies for personnel
who assisted in the preparation of large-scale protective plans.(26)

(1) The committee approach.--From the beginning of its investigation
of the Secret Service, the committee realized the great importance
of the Protective Research Section, renamed the Office of Protective
Research in October 1965. This office is the memory of the
Secret Service and is responsible for analyzing threat data.(27) By
reviewing PRS files and interviewing its personnel, the committee
sought to clarify just how much the Secret Service knew about the
nature and degree of the dangers the President faced in the fall of
1963 and to learn what protective tactics had been devised in response
to them.

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The committee took care to distinguish between major and minor
threats to the President in order that it could concentrate on the follow-up
action to the significant ones. A threat was considered major if:
(a) it was verbal or communicated by a threatening act, or (b) it created
a danger great enough to require either an in-depth and intense
investigation by the Secret Service or other law enforcement agency,
or a cancellation or alteration of the President's planned trip itinerary.

The Committee examined all threat profile investigations from
March to December 1963 and incorporated into its analysis information
on some major threat activities dating back to March 1961.(28)

The committee also considered the following questions in its investigation
of Secret Service threat activity files, questions raised by the
Kennedy assassination itself:

Were there indications of a conspiracy behind threats to harm persons
under Secret Service protection?

Was there information developed in investigations of earlier threats
that might have been useful in the investigation of the assassination?

Was the pertinent information in Secret Service files made available
to the Warren Commission?

The committee began its investigation of Secret Service performance
by reviewing the Warren Commission's findings on it. Although
the Commission had considered both the question of intelligence-gathering
and threat identification and the question of physical protection,
it had relied primarily on a study conducted by the Secret
Service in response to the President's assassination and to limited
questioning of Secret Service personnel in depositions and hearings.
The Commission's findings, in turn, stressed inadequate liaison between
the Secret Service and other Government agencies in
intelligence-gathering; (29) the need for broader criteria and
automatic data processing in the assimilation of intelligence data by the
Protective Research Section; (30) and the need for closer working arrangements
between the PRS and the advance survey teams that handled
preparations for Presidential trips. (31)

With respect to physical protection of the President, the Commission
found that some aspects could have been improved, citing specifically
the need for closer coordination and clearer definition of
responsibilities among Secret Service headquarters, advance and protective
detail agents, and local police authorities; (32) the failure to
arrange for prior inspection of buildings along the motorcade route;
(33) and a lack of discipline and bad judgment by some members of
the Secret Service protective detail in Dallas, who were drinking on
the night before the assassination. (34)

In its investigation, the committee relied heavily on Protective Research
Section files. In addition, it took extensive testimony under oath
from agents and officials who occupied pertinent positions in the Secret
Service in 1963.

The committee's investigation confirmed that the Warren Commission's
suggestions for improved Secret Service performance were well
founded. The committee also noted that there were additional issues
not addressed by the Warren Commission. One important one not
analyzed by the Commission was whether the information that the
Secret Service did possess prior to November 22, 1963, was properly

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analyzed and acted upon. The committee found that the Secret Service
did in fact possess information that was not properly analyzed and
disseminated within the Secret Service. Consequently, it was not put
to use with respect either to a protective investigation or to
physical protection of President Kennedy in advance of the trip to Dallas.

The Warren Commission had found that the Secret Service should
have taken a broader view of information that was considered a threat
to the President. (35) The committee also took a closer look at
Secret Service files to see if they contained what could have been
recognized as significant threats that were simply overlooked in connection
with the Dallas trip.

The committee discovered that the 1963 Protective Research Section
files had since been summarized and computerized, (36) and the original files
then destroyed. The committee thus reviewed the computerized
summaries of PRS case files for the period March to December
1963.(37) The summaries indicated that during this period, the PRS
received information on over 400 possible threats to the President,
approximately 20 percent of which could have been attributed to political
motivation. The committee then reviewed the trip files for 1963 to
determine which threats the Secret Service had recognized as significant. (38)
Although there are other concepts of significance, the committee
decided to limit its review to those that actually caused cancellation of a trip,
an alteration of the President's planned itinerary, or an intensive preliminary
investigative effort by the Secret Service. By limiting the definition in this way, the
committee believed it could reach a clear determination of the manner in which the
Secret Service responded to significant threats.

The Secret Service "trip files" actually consisted of two basic documents
a preliminary survey report, reflecting the basic plans for a
trip, and a final survey report, prepared after a trip had been completed,
and incorporating any changes that had been made in the original
plan. (39) These files were intended by the Secret Service to reflect
principal problems encountered on each trip. A comparison of the
preliminary and final reports should have revealed not only alterations
of the President's itinerary, but the reasons for such changes.
Because the final survey reports did not always reveal the specific
nature of threats,(40) other files on investigations conducted prior to
the President's trips in 1963 were also reviewed, and interviews with
agents who worked on each trip were conducted.

(2) Significant threats in 1963.--The committee's review determined
there were three significant threats to the President in the March to
December 1963 period: first, a postcard warned that he would be
assassinated while riding in a motorcade this resulted in additional
protection being provided when the President went to Chicago in
March;(41) second, a threat in connection with a November 2 trip to
Chicago that was canceled;(42) third, a threat in connection with
a trip to Miami on November 18, (43)1 resulting in an extensive
preliminary investigation. The nature of the threats on November 2 and
November 18 revealed these had been the reason for the Secret Service

1A Miami journalist later reported that a decision
was made to transport President Kennedy from Miami International Airport to a Miami
Beach hotel by helicopter to avoid exposing him to assassins by having him ride in a motorcade.
The committee could find no documentation for this report. (44)

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to have investigated individuals identified with them in terms of future
danger to the president. (45)

The committee was unable to determine specifically why the President's
trip to Chicago, scheduled for November 2, was canceled. The
possibilities range from the condition of his health(46) to concern for
the situation in South Vietnam following the assassination of President
Diem (47) to the threat received on October 30.(48) On that
date, the Secret Service learned that an individual named Thomas Arthur
Vallee, a Chicago resident who was outspokenly opposed to President
Kennedy's foreign policy, was in possession of several weapons.(49)
Further, Vallee's landlady reported that he had requested time off
from his job on November 2.(50) Vallee was subsequently interviewed,
surveilled and eventually arrested by the Chicago police, who found
an M-1 rifle, a handgun and 3,000 rounds of ammunition in his automobile. (51)
Vallee was released from custody on the evening of November 2. (52)

The committee found that the Secret Service learned more about
Vallee prior to the President's trip to Dallas on November 22: he was
a Marine Corps veteran with a history of mental illness while on active
duty;(53) he was a member of the John Birch Society(54) and an
extremist in his criticism of the Kennedy administration;(55) and
he claimed to be an expert marksman.(56) Further, he remained a
threat after November 2, because he had been released from jail.(57)

The committee also learned that the information the Secret Service
obtained on Vallee was not forwarded to the agents responsible for the
President's trip to Texas on November 21-22, although it was transmitted
to Protective Research Section upon receipt on October 30.(58)
The potential significance of Vallee as a threat was illustrated
by the Secret Service's reports, which included a notation on
November 27, 1963 of the similarity between his background and that
of Lee Harvey Oswald,(59) and a record of extensive, continued investigation
of Vallee's activities until 1968.(60)

In addition, the committee obtained the testimony of a former Secret
Service agent, Abraham Bolden, who had been assigned to the Chicago
office in 1963. He alleged that shortly before November 2, the FBI sent
a teletype message to the Chicago Secret Service office stating that an
attempt to assassinate the President would be made on November 2 by
a four-man team using high-powered rifles, and that at least one member
of the team had a Spanish-sounding name.(61) Bolden claimed
that while he did not personally participate in surveillance of the subjects,
he learned about a surveillance of the four by monitoring Secret
Service radio channels in his automobile and by observing one of the
subjects being detained in his Chicago office.(62)

According to Bolden's account, the Secret Service succeeded in locating
and surveillance two of the threat subjects who,(63) when they
discovered they were being watched, were arrested and detained on
the evening of November 1 in the Chicago Secret Service office.(64)

The committee was unable to document the existence of the alleged
assassination team. Specifically, no agent who had been assigned to
Chicago confirmed any aspect of Bolden's version.(65) One agent did
state there had been a threat in Chicago during that period, but he was
unable to recall details.(66) Bolden did not link Vallee to the supposed

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four-man assassination team, although he claimed to remember Vallee's
name in connection with a 1963 Chicago case. (67) He did not recognize
Vallee's photograph when shown it by the committee. (68)

The questionable authenticity of the Bolden account notwithstanding,
the committee believed the Secret Service failed to make appropriate
use of the information supplied it by the Chicago threat in early
November 1963.

Similarly, the Secret Service failed to follow up fully on a threat
in Miami, also in November 1963. On November 9, 1963, an informant for
the Miami police, William Somersett, had secretly recorded a conversation
with a rightwing extremist named Joseph A. Milteer, who suggested
there was a plot in existence to assassinate the President with a
high-powered rifle from a tall building. (69) Miami Police intelligence
officers met with Secret Service agents on November 12 and provided a
transcript of the Somersett recording. (70) It read in part:

SOMERSETT. I think Kennedy is coming here November 18
to make some kind of speech. I don't know what it is, but I
imagine it will be on TV.
MILTEER. You can bet your bottom dollar he is going to have
a lot to say about the Cubans; there are so many of them here.
SOMMERSETT. Well, he'll have a thousand bodyguards, don't
worry about that.
MILTEER. The more bodyguards he has, the easier it is to get him.
SOMERSETT. What?
MILTEER. The more bodyguards he has, the easier it is to get
him.
SOMERSETT. Well, how in the hell do you figure would be the best way to get him?
MILTEER. From an office building with a high-powered rifle....
SOMERSETT. They are really going to try to kill him?
MILTEER. Oh, yeah; it is in the working....
SOMERSETT. ...Hitting this Kennedy is going to be a
hard proposition. I believe you may have figured out a way to
get him, the office building and all that. I don't know how
them Secret Service agents cover all them office buildings
everywhere he is going. Do you know whether they do that
or not?
MILTEER. Well, if they have any suspicion, they do that, of
course. But without suspicion, chances are that they wouldn't.

During the meeting at which the Miami Police Department provided
this transcript to the Secret Service, it also advised the Secret
Service that Milteer had been involved with persons who professed a
dislike for President Kennedy and were suspected of having committed
violent acts, including the bombing of a Birmingham, Ala. church in
which four young girls had been killed. They also reported that Milteer
was connected with several radical rightwing organizations and traveled
extensively throughout the United States in support of their
views. (71)

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Although it would have been possible to read Milteer's threats as
hollow speculation, the Secret Service did not dismiss them lightly.
The case agent in the Miami office forwarded a report and a recording
of the Somersett-Milteer conversation to the Protective Research
Section.(72) Robert I. Bouck, special agent in charge of PRS, then
requested that the Miami office make discreet inquiries about
Milteer. (73)

On November 18, 1963, Special Agent Robert Jamison of the
Miami Secret Service office, in an interview with Somersett, had him
place a telephone call to Milteer at his home in Valdosta, Ga., to
verify he was in that city.(74) In addition, Jamison learned that
Somersett did not knew the identity of any violence-prone associates
of Milteer in the Miami area.(75) The November 26 Miami field
office report indicated that the information gathered "was furnished
the agents making the advance arrangements before the visit of the
President ..."(76) PRS then closed the case, and copies of its
report were sent to the Chief of Secret Service and to field offices
in Atlanta, Philadelphia, Indianapolis, Nashville, Washington, and
Miami.(77)

The Milteer threat was ignored by Secret Service personnel in
planning the trip to Dallas. PRS Special Agent-in-Charge Bouck,
who was notified on November 8 that the President would visit Miami
on November 18, told the committee that relevant PRS information
would have been supplied to the agents conducting advance preparations
for the scheduled trip to Miami,(78) but no effort was made to
relay it to Special Agent Winston G. Lawson, who was responsible
for preparations for the trip to Dallas, 2 or to Forrest Sorrels, special
agent-in-charge of the Dallas office. Nor were Sorrels or any Secret
Service agent responsible for intelligence with respect to the Dallas
trip informed of the Milteer threat before November 22, 1963. (80)

Following the assassination, Somersett again met with Milteer. Milteer
commented that things had gone as he had predicted. Somersett
asked if Milteer actually had known in advance of the assassination or
had just been guessing. Milteer asserted that he had been certain
beforehand about the inevitability of the assassination. (81)

Bouck and Inspector Thomas Kelley, who was assigned to represent
the Secret Service in the investigation of the Kennedy assassination,
testified to the committee that threat information was
transmitted from one region of the country to another if there was
specific evidence it was relevant to the receiving region. (82)
The fact was, however, that two threats to assassinate President Kennedy
with high-powered rifles, both of which occurred in early November 1963,
were not relayed to the Dallas region.

(3) Inspection of the motorcade
route.--During the Secret Service
check of the Dallas motorcade route, Special Agent-in-Charge Sorrels
commented that if someone wanted to assassinate the President, it
could be done with a rifle from a high building.(83) President

2Lawson, on November 8, visited the PRS office in Washington to check geographical
indexes. They revealed no listing of any individual or group that posed a potential danger to the President in the territory of the
Secret Service regional office that included Dallas and Fort Worth. (79)

Page 234

Kennedy himself had remarked he could be shot from a high building
and little could be done to stop it. (84) But such comments were
just speculation. Unless the Secret Service had a specific reason to suspect
the occupants or activities in a certain building, it would not
inspect it. (85) The committee found that at the time of the Dallas trip,
there was not sufficient concern about the possibility of an attack from
a high building to cause the agents responsible for trip planning to
develop security precautions to minimize the risk.

The Warren Commission commented that a building survey conducted
under a "level of risk" criterion might well have included the
Texas School Book Depository.(86) Although the agent in the lead
vehicle had some responsibility to scan the route for danger, (87) this
would have been woefully inadequate to protect against a concealed
sniper. Television films taken in Dallas on November 22, 1963 show
foot patrolmen facing the motorcade but not the crowd or the buildings. (88)
The police captain in charge of security on the route was
not instructed to have his men watch the buildings, although they were
ordered to watch the crowds.(89) The committee found that if the
threats that the PRS was aware of had been communicated to agents
responsible for the Dallas trip, additional precautions might have
been taken. 3

(4) Performance at the time of
the assassination.--The committee concluded that
Secret Service agents in the motorcade were inadequately
prepared for an attack by a concealed sniper. Using films and
photographs taken of the motorcade at the time of the firing of the
shots and immediately thereafter, the committee studied the reactions
of Secret Service agents. (96) In addition, the committee questioned
agents who had been in the motorcade with respect to their
preparedness to react to gunfire.

The committee found that, consistent with the protective procedures
and instructions they had been given,(97) the Secret Service
agents performed professionally and reacted quickly to the danger.
But the committee also found that a greater degree of awareness of
the possibility of sniper fire could have decreased reaction time on the
part of the agents and increased the degree of protection afforded the
President. 4

No actions were taken by the agent in the right front seat of the
Presidential limousine to cover the President with his body,
although it would have been consistent with Secret Service procedure for
him

3The committee's investigation of the Vallee and Milteer threats
dealt primarily with the Secret Service response to them. It also, however, investigated any
actual connection they might have had with the assassination. In the Vallee case, the
committee contacted relatives and his union (90) and visited his most recent known address (91)
but was unable to develop additional information. Although Milteer as well as Somersett had since
died, the committee did obtain the names and addresses of rightwing associates of Milteer.
It found no connection to Oswald or Ruby or their associates. (92) The committee also investigated
information that Milteer had called a friend from Dallas on the morning of November 22, 1963, (93) as well as an allegation
that Milteer appeared in a photograph of the Presidential motorcade in Dallas. (94) The committee's
investigation-- which included an analysis of the photograph in question by forensic anthropologists--
could find no evidence that Milteer was in Dallas on the day of the assassination. (95) In its
investigation, therefore, the committee was unable to find a connection between the threat in
Chicago or the threat in Miami with the assassination in Dallas.

4The committee, of course, noted that if sniper fire had been expected,
the motorcade should have been canceled. The committee learned that instruction received by the
Secret Service agents in 1978 in responding to a variety of emergency threats and attacks was
far more intensive than it was in 1963. (98)

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to have done so. (99) The primary function of the agent was to remain
at all times in close proximity to the President in the event of such
emergencies.(100) The committee found that the instructions to the
driver of the limousine were inadequate to maximize his recognition
of, and response to, such emergencies.(101) He should have been given
the responsibility to react instantaneously on his own initiative and to
take evasive action. Instead, his instructions were to act only at the
judgment of the agent in the right passenger seat, who had general
supervisory responsibilities.(102)

The committee found from its acoustical analysis that approximately
8.3 seconds elapsed from the first shot to the fatal head shot.(103)
Under the circumstances, each second was crucial, and the delay in
taking evasive action while awaiting instructions should have been
avoided. Had the agents assigned to the motorcade been alert to the
possibility of sniper fire, they possibly could have convinced the President
to allow them to maintain protective positions of the rear bumper
of the Presidential limousine, and both shielded the President and
reacted more quickly to cover him when the attack began. The committee
recognized, however, that President Kennedy consistently
rejected the secret Service's suggestions that he permit agents to ride
on the rear bumper of the Presidential limousine or permit motorcycles
on the rear bumper of the Presidential limousine or permit motorcycles
to ride parallel to the limousine and in close proximity to it.(104)

Although the conduct of the agents was without firm direction and
evidenced a lack of preparedness,(105) the committee found that many
of the agents reacted in a positive, protective manner. Agent Clint
Hill, assigned to protect the first lady, reacted almost instantaneously.(106)
Agent Thomas "Lem" Johns left Vice President Johnson's
follow-up car in an effort to reach the Vice President's limousine, but
he was left behind momentarily in Dealey Plaza as the procession sped
away to Parkland Hospital.(107) Photographic analysis revealed that
other agents were beginning to react approximately 1.6 seconds after
the first shot.(108)

In reviewing the reactions of the agents, the committee also reexamined
the allegation that several had been out drinking the evening
before and the morning of the assassination.(109) Four of the
nine agents alleged to have been involved were assigned to the motorcade
and had key responsibilities as members of the President's follow-up car.(110)
The supervisor of the agents involved advised that each
agent reported for duty on time, with full possession of his mental
and physical capabilities and was entirely ready to perform his
assigned duties.(111) Inspector Thomas Kelley, who was in charge of
an evaluation of Secret Service performance in the assassination, testified
before the committee that an investigation of the drinking incident
led to a conclusion that no agent violated any Secret Service
rule.(112)

In an effort to reach its own conclusion about the drinking incident,
the committee reviewed film coverage of the agents' movements at the
time of the shooting. The committee found nothing in the reactions
of the agents that would contradict the testimony of the Secret Service
officials.(113)

(b) The responsibility of the
Secret Service to investigate the assassination was terminated when the Federal
Bureau of Investigation assumed primary investigative responsibility.

The committee found that the investigation by the Secret Service
after the assassination was terminated prematurely when President
Johnson ordered that the FBI assume primary investigative responsibility. (114)
Although the initial investigative efforts of the Secret
Service lacked coordination, individual field offices with information
that might have been related to the assassination had started their own
investigations and pursued them aggressively.

How the Secret Service responded after the assassination is illustrated
by the investigation conducted by the Chicago Secret Service
office. After the assassination, the acting special agent-in-charge of
the Chicago field office wrote an urgent report indicating he had
received reliable information about "a group in the Chicago area who
(sic) may have a connection with the JFK assassination."(115) This
report was based on information received after the assassination from
a reliable informant who reported a conversation he had on November
21, 1963.(116) The informant, Thomas Mosley, reported that
for some time he had been involved in negotiating the sale of illegal
arms with a Cuban exile, an outspoken critic of President Kennedy
named Homer S. Echevarria.(117) On November 21, Echevarria had
said his group now had "plenty of money" and that they were prepared
to proceed with the purchases "as soon as we [or they] take care of
Kennedy."(118)

After receiving the initial report, the Secret Service surveilled
subsequent meetings between Mosley and Echevarria, (119) received
reports from Mosley about the conversations,(120) and discussed the
progress of the investigation with the local FBI office.(121) By
December 3, 1963, a fuller picture of Echevarria was obtained(122) and
reported to the Protective Research Section.(123) By that date, it
appeared that Echevarria was a member of the 30th of November
(Cuban exile) Movement,(124) that an associate of his who had also
spoken directly with Mosley about the arms sales was Juan Francisco
Blanco-Fernandez, military director for the Cuban Student Revolutionary
Directorate (DRE), (125)5 and that the arms purchases were
being financed through Paulino Sierra Martinez, a Cuban exile who
had become a Chicago lawyer.(126) Mosley inferred from his conversation
with Echevarria and Blanco that Sierra's financial backers
consisted in part of "hoodlum elements" who were "not restricted to
Chicago."(127)

The committee's investigation provided substantial corroboration
for the Secret Service's concern about the Mosley allegations. The
committee found that the 30th of November Movement was receiving
financial backing through the Junta del Gobierno de Cuba en el Exilio
(JGCE), a Chicago-based organization led by Sierra. JGCE was
essentially a coalition of predominantly right-wing anti-Castro
groups.(128) It had been formed in April 1963 and abolished abruptly
in January 1964. (129) During its short life, JGCE apparently
acquired enormous financial backing, secured at least in part from

5As previously noted, the FBI had learned that the Miami-based
DRE had a representative in New Orleans, Carlos Bringuier, who had contact with Oswald in the
summer of 1963 (see section I C 3 on anti-Castro Cuban exiles).

Page 237

organized gambling interests in Las Vegas and Cleveland.(130) JGCE
actively used its funds to purchase large quantities of weapons and
to support is member groups in conducting military raids on
Cuba.(131) The affiliates of JGCE, in addition to the 30th of November
Movement, included Alpha 66, led by Antonio Veciana Blanch, 6
and the MIRR, whose leader was militant anti-Castro terrorist, Orlando
Bosch Avila.(132)

The Secret Service recognized the need to investigate the alleged
plots by Cuban exile groups more fully, especially that of Echevarria's
30th of November group.(133) But when the progress of the investigation
was discussed with the FBI, the FBI responded that the 30th of
November group was not likely to have been involved in any illegal
acts.(134)7 The Secret Service initially was reluctant to accept
this representation in light of the evidence it had developed that indicated
the group was in fact involved in illegal activities,(137) and therefore
began preparations to place an undercover agent in Echevarria's
groups to investigate his activities more closely.(138) On November
29, 1963, however, President Johnson created the Warren Commission
and gave the FBI primary investigative responsibility.(139)
Although the Secret Service understood the President's order to mean
primary, not exclusive, investigative responsibility, (140) the FBI,
according to testimony of former Secret Service Chief James J. Rowley
and Inspector Thomas J. Delley, soon made it clear that it did not
consider the Secret Service to be an equal collaborator in the post-assassination
investigation. Rowley testified that "in the ultimate," there
was "no particular jurisdiction" on the part of the Secret Service to
cooperate in the post-assassination investigation.(141) Inspector Kelley
testified that an order came down not only to the Secret Service but
to the Dallas Police Department that the FBI would take "full responsibility,"
(142) not joint responsibility, for the postassassination
investigation of conspiracies.

In summary, the committee concluded that the Secret Service did
in fact possess information that was not properly analyzed and put
to use with respect to a protective investigation in advance of President
Kennedy's trip to Dallas. Further, it was the committee's opinion
that Secret Service agents in the Presidential motorcade in Dallas
were not adequately prepared for an attack by a concealed sniper.
Finally, the committee found that the investigation by the Secret
Service of a possible assassination conspiracy was terminated prematurely
when President Johnson ordered that the FBI assume primary
investigative responsibility.

2. The Department of Justice Failed to Exercise
Initiative in Supervising and Directing the Investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the Assassination
Go to the footnotes for this section.
The position of Attorney General was created by law in 1789, but
not until after the Civil War did not role of the chief legal officer of the

6See section I C 3 on anti-Castro Cuban exiles.

7As discussed in the section on the FBI investigation,
the Bureau's Nationalities Intelligence Section, the most knowledgeable about anti-Castro
Cuban exile activities, did not actively participate in the investigation, nor did the Bureau
ever fully investigate the question of Cuban involvement. (1354) After the Secret Service provided the results of its
Echevarria investigation to the FBI, the FBI conducted only a limited investigation and
closed the case on him. (136)

Page 238

U.S. Government acquire its modern institutional forms. Since the
post was (and is) appointive, the Department of Justice was established
in 1870 to insure continuity from one administration to another.
Over time, the Department increasingly took the lead in major Federal
prosecutions and other Federal legal matters.

In the aftermath of the assassination of President Kennedy, the
Justice Department participated in various discussions with White
House and FBI officials, and it had a major part in the formation of
the Warren Commission. The committee found, however, that the Department
largely abdicated what should have been important responsibilities
in the continuing investigation.

The committee determined, for example, that during the critical
early days before there was a Warren Commission, officials at Justice
did not exercise any significant role in shaping, monitoring or evaluating
the FBI's investigation, despite the Bureau's organizational
status as an agency within the Department. (1) Similarly, the
committee discovered little indication that Justice Department officials
moved to mount a sophisticated criminal investigation of the
assassination, including its conspiracy implications, an investigation that could
have relied on the enormous resources of the Department--its
specialized investigative sections and attorneys, as well as the powers and
capabilities of a Federal grand jury and the granting of immunity. (2)
There was, the committee concluded, ample reason for the Department
to have become so involved, since various officials contacted by
the committee agreed that Federal jurisdiction existed, in spite of
some confusion over each of the applicable statutes.

In examining the performance of the Department of Justice in the
Kennedy assassination, the committee took into account the importance
of the understandable personal situation of Attorney General Robert
F. Kennedy during the period following his brother's death. The
committee found that the Attorney General's deep-felt grief in fact
significantly affected the Government's handling of the investigation,
and that this effect was magnified by the inability of Attorney General
Kennedy's deputies to take a strong position with FBI Director J.
Edgar Hoover on the course of the investigation.

The committee did note that officials at Justice, notably Deputy Attorney
General Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, were instrumental in creating the
Warren Commission, in effect transferring the focus of the
investigation from the FBI to a panel of distinguished Americans.
Nevertheless, as before, the Department exercised little authority in
the investigation that followed the formation of the Commission. (3)

In testimony at a public hearing of the committee, Katzenbach said
he believed it would have been distasteful and of questionable propriety
for Robert Kennedy to have presided over the investigation of
his brother's death. (4) He insisted there had been a need for a special
investigative body that could make use of the resources of a number
of Federal agencies.(5) The committee agreed with Katzenbach's
general points.

The committee observed, nevertheless, that it was regrettable that
the Department of Justice was taken out of the investigation, for
whatever reason. It was unfortunate that it played so small a role in
insuring the most thorough investigation of President Kennedy's as-

Page 239

sassination. The promise of what the Department might have realized
in fact was great, particularly in the use of such evidence-gathering
tools such as a grand jury and grants of immunity.

(a) The Federal Bureau of Investigation adequately investigated Lee
Harvey Oswald prior to the assassination and properly evaluated
the evidence it possessed to assess his potential to endanger the
public safety in a national emergency

(b) The Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted a thorough and
professional investigation into the responsibility of Lee Harvey
Oswald for the assassination

(c) The Federal Bureau of Investigation failed to investigate adequately
the possibility of a conspiracy to assassinate the President

(d) The Federal Bureau of Investigation was deficient in its sharing of
information with other agencies and departments

Until after the turn of the century Federal agencies and departments
were responsible for their own investigations.
The Department of Justice was primarily a prosecutorial
body, although it had been given statutory authority to perform investigations
in 1891. In 1907, Atty. Gen. Charles J. Bonaparte proposed
an investigative force in the Justice Department and went ahead
with it despite objections in Congress. His successor, George Wickersham,
named the force the Bureau of Investigation. (1)

By the end of World War I, the Bureau was firmly established as the
main investigative arm of the Federal Government, its size increasing
fivefold from 1916 to 1920. The two major influences on this growth
were: (1) the war itself, which confronted the Bureau with the task of
enforcing President Wilson's alien enemy proclamations and with the
problems of draft evasion and enemy espionage; and (2) the passage
of the Mann Act, which gave the Federal Government jurisdiction
over certain interstate criminal activities. Both made increased personnel
and budgetary demands on the Bureau. (2)

After the war--in the period 1919 to 1924-- two successive Attorneys
General abused the power of the Bureau of Investigation. A.
Mitchell Palmer, in his campaign against Bolshevist radicals, acted with
questionable legality. After the bombing of his home in June 1919, Palmer
created a General Intelligence Division within the Bureau to deal
with radicalism. He named a young Justice Department attorney, J.
Edgar Hoover, to head the Division. It used covert as well as overt
means to gather information on suspected radicals. (3)

In 1920, Attorney General Palmer also directed the wholesale deportation
of members of the American Communist Party and the Communist
Labor Party. This led to the controversial "Palmer raids,"
which diminished the standing of American Communists and came to symbolize
the misuse of police power for a political purpose.

Then came the Harding administration, under which Harry Daugherty,
the President's campaign manager, was named Attorney General.
He in turn appointed his friend, William S. Burns, of the Burns Detective
Agency, to run the Bureau. Burns was antiradical and antilabor

Page 240

as well, and he continued the questionable tactics of wiretapping and
surreptitious entry in investigative work. Although the primary target
continued to be Communists, the Bureau dealt a heavy blow to the Ku
Klux Klan. (4)

Harlan Fiske Stone, a New York attorney and civil libertarian, was
appointed Attorney General by Calvin Coolidge in 1924. Stone was
reformer, and he named Hoover Director of the Bureau of Investigation,
with a mandate to clean it up. Hoover created it structure and a
set of policies that were to endure for the nearly 50 years of his tenure.
He also established the independence of the Bureau within the Department
of Justice.1

The Bureau stayed out of the limelight until the 1930's, when the
emergence of a resourceful criminal underworld, feeding on the public
response to Prohibition, became a national menace. The Bureau was
recognized as the single law enforcement agency in the country that
could cope with crime of such a national scope.

In 1933 public outrage over the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh's
infant son led to enactment of the so-called "Lindbergh Law." It added
kidnapping to the list of interstate crimes that came under the jurisdiction
of the Bureau.

Then, in 1934, there was a major expansion of Federal criminal
when Congress passed a package of nine new statutes. They dealt with
such crimes as killing or assaulting a Federal law enforcement officer,
fleeing across a State line to avoid apprehension or prosecution, extortion
involving interstate commerce. (5) That same year, Bureau agents
were granted authority to go beyond general investigative powers
to serve warrants and subpoenas, to make seizures and arrests and to
carry arms. They were soon to be tagged "G-men" by the underworld.

The Bureau was renamed in 1935, becoming the Federal Bureau of
Investigation, and by the end of the decade it was able to point to an
array of accomplishments, for example:

A Division of Identification with central fingerprint records;
An FBI laboratory with up-to-date scientific law enforcement techniques; and
A National Police Academy for training State and local law enforcement officers. (6)

The Bureau had no internal security or counterintelligence functions
until they were established, beginning in 1936, by a series of Presidential
orders coupled with a secret oral agreement between Hoover and
President Roosevelt. The FBI was authorized to store intelligence information
collected by other Federal agencies.

In 1939, a written directive was issued providing that the FBI take
charge of investigative work relating to "espionage, sabotage, and violation
of neutrality regulations." Subversive activities were not specifically
mentioned until 1950, in an Executive order by President Truman. (7)

The FBI's primary responsibility during World War II was enforcement
of laws dealing with espionage, sabotage, and conscription. It also
handled the apprehension of enemy aliens.(Hoover was one of

1Hoover accepted the directorship with the assurance
from Stone that he would have a free hand in running it and that it would be completely
divorced from politics.

Page 241

the few Government officials who opposed the relocation of Japanese
citizens as a violation of their civil rights.) (8)

The FBI also conducted foreign intelligence in South America,
attempting to gather information on activities detrimental to U.S.
interests. FBI involvement in foreign intelligence was ordered terminated
after World War II when the Central Intelligence Agency was
formed.

After World War II, the fear of communist was such that internal
security activities against it were acceptable to most Americans.
The FBI's actions were based on statutes that covered membership in the
Communist Party, including the Smith Act, the Internal Security Act
of 1950, and the Communist Control Act of 1954. (9)

J. Edgar Hoover himself defined as disloyal any acts that could pose
a threat to the Government, and even after the anti-Communist fervor
of the McCarthy era had subsided, the internal security operations of
the FBI continued at a high pace. By 1960, Hoover had developed a
force of agents who employed sophisticated investigative techniques
and enjoyed unusual independence. Hoover himself had become a formidable
figure who deftly handled Presidents, Attorneys General,
and Members of Congress. He was looked upon as an extraordinary crime
fighter, and FBI appropriations passed without serious opposition
after pro forma hearings.

(2) The FBI investigation.--
From the beginning of its examination of the performance of the FBI in the
Kennedy investigation, the
committee was impressed with the extraordinary work that was done
in certain aspects of the case. The thoroughness and efficiency of the
collection and processing of such a mass of evidence, for example, could
hardly be overstated. What can be said in criticism of the Bureau must
be placed in the context of the superior performance of the vast majority
of the agents who worked long hours on the investigation.
Nevertheless, the committee did find some deficiencies and shortcomings
in the FBI investigation.

The FBI was the only Federal agency to conduct a full field investigation
in the period immediately after the assassination, the
period in which the evidentiary components at the crime scene for solving
a homicide are assembled in the great majority of cases. Thereafter,
the FBI continued to assume an overwhelming share of the burden
of the investigation. Since the Warren Commission did not have its
own investigative staff, the Bureau was responsible for the investigative
raw product, including the evidence upon which the Commission's
deliberations about a possible domestic conspiracy were to be
based. (10)

The committee concluded from its lengthy study of the roles of the
FBI, Secret Service, CIA, and other Federal agencies that assisted the
Warren Commission that the final determinations of who was responsible
for President Kennedy's murder and whether there had been a
conspiracy were based largely on the work of the FBI.(11) With an
acute awareness of the significance of its finding, the committee concluded
that the FBI's investigation of whether there had been a conspiracy
in President Kennedy's assassination was seriously flawed.
The conspiracy aspects of the investigation were characterized by a

Page 242

limited approach and an inadequate application and use of available
resource.(12)

The committee concluded that the FBI's investigation into a conspiracy
was deficient in the areas that the committee decided were most
worthy of suspicion organized crime, pro- and anti-Castro Cubans,
and the possible associations of individuals from these areas with
Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby. In those areas in particular, the
committee found that the FBI's investigation was in all likelihood
insufficient to have uncovered a conspiracy.

Given the FBI's justifiable reputation as one of the most professional
and respected criminal investigative agencies in the world, its effort
in the Kennedy assassination was expected to be of the highest degree
of thoroughness and integrity. Indeed, it was an effort of unparalleled
magnitude in keeping with the gravity of the crime, resulting in the
assignment of more Bureau resources than for any criminal case in
its history. (13) In terms of hours worked, interviews conducted and
tests performed, the FBI's response was, in fact, unexcelled. It was
wide-ranging that it could not be easily summarized, as could the
FBI's investigation of the assassination in 1968 of Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr. Over 80 Bureau personnel were sent to Dallas, over 25,000
interviews were conducted, and 2,300 reports, consisting of 25,400
pages, were prepared. (14)

The FBI collected and examined the physical evidence with an impressive
array of scientific equipment and personnel. By means of
unusually rapid compilation of test results, laboratory and field personnel
of the Bureau were. able to trace elements of the physical evidence
to Oswald, and a series of sophisticated techniques led to early
identification of Oswald's rifle as the murder weapon. (15) Then,
using spectrographic, fingerprint, textile, and other analyses, the
Bureau was able to assemble a substantial mass of evidence that led to the
identification of Oswald as a possible gunman. (16) Based on the
committee's independent evaluation of the FBI's test results, the committee
found that the FBI's performance in the investigation was at its best in
the area of scientific analysis. Similarly, the FBI's ability to compile
abundance of disparate documentary evidence pertaining to Oswald's
background and activities at the time of the assassination was highly
commendable; it made full and efficient use of hundreds of FBI
personnel. (17)

On the other hand, a qualitative assessment of aspects of the
investigation raised some perplexing questions. From an appraisal of
the structure of the operation, the committee detected weaknesses in both
formulation and execution. The committee found evidence of organizational
fragmentation,(18) an allocation of duties among various
divisions of the Bureau that considerably, if unintentionally, compromised
the quality of the effort, to investigate the possibility of a
conspiracy(19).3

The assassination investigation was divided between two main divisions
of the FBI, the General Investigative Division and the Domestic

2The former assistant director, since deceased, who
coordinated the FBI's conspiracy investigation himself characterized the effort in testimony
before the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence
Activities as rushed, chaotic, and shallow, despite the enormity of paperwork that was
generated. (20)

Page 243

Intelligence Division. A primary responsibility. of the General Investigative
Division (21) was assembly of the basic facts of the assassination
by means of testing and analysis of physical evidence.(22)
Traditionally the General Investigative Division handled FBI murder
investigations, and it was the official in charge of the bank robbery
desk in that Division who supervised the assassination investigation,
since, according to the Bureau's manual of operations, jurisdiction for
assaults on Federal officials was appropriately assigned to his desk.

The committee's conclusion that conspiracy was a blind spot in the
FBI's investigation was reflected in the observation of the assistant
FBI director in charge of the General Investigative Division, who
said that while the Division was charged with investigating who
specifically fired the shot or shots that killed President Kennedy,
whether persons other than Oswald were involved was an "ancillary
matter" that was not part of his division's responsibility. (23)
He also characterized the investigation by saying, "...we were in the
position of standing on the corner with our pocket open, waiting for
someone to drop information into it, and we utilized what was fed to us,
and disseminated it ...to the Warren Commission." (24)

Within the General Investigative Division, the probe of Jack Ruby
was delegated to the Civil Rights Division on the theory that Ruby
violated Oswald's civil rights by killing him. (25) While the committee,
in its investigation, found that Ruby's links to various organized
crime figures were contained in reports received by the FBI in the
weeks following his shooting of Oswald, the Bureau was seriously
delinquent in investigating the Ruby-underworld connections. (26) The
committee established that the Bureau's own organized crime and
Mafia specialists were not consulted or asked to participate to any
significant degree. (27) The assistant director who was in charge of the
organized crime division, the Special Investigative Division, told the
committee, "They sure didn't come to me ...We had no part in
that I can recall."(28) The committee also determined that the
Bureau's lack of interest in organized crime extended to its investigation
of Oswald.

The Domestic Intelligence Division was responsible for the FBI's
investigation of Oswald's activities, associations, and motivations, and
it was assigned to consider all questions of a possible foreign conspiracy. (29)
The assistant director who ran this phase of the investigation,
however, had been one of several FBI officials and agents who
were disciplined by Director Hoover following the assassination for
what the Inspection Division determined to have been deficient performance
in the investigation of Oswald prior to the assassination. The
disciplinary action was kept a Bureau secret. Not even the Warren
Commission was informed of it.

Within the Domestic Intelligence Division, the investigation
Oswald and a possible conspiracy was assigned to a team of agents
from the Bureau's Soviet section because Oswald had been an avowed
Marxist who had defected to the Soviet Union. (30)

While numerous specialists on Cuban affairs and exile activities
were assigned to the Domestic Intelligence Division, the committee
found that they were seldom consulted on the assassination or asked
to participate in the investigation, despite the reported connections

Page 244

between both Oswald and Ruby and individuals active in Cuban revolutionary
activities. (31) Supervisors of Cuba-related activities at the
Bureau in the early 1960's told the committee they were unaware of
any investigation of the Cuban issue with respect to the assassination.
Similarly, the committee found that neither the Domestic Intelligence
Division nor FBI headquarters authorized an intelligence investigation
into possible foreign complicity in the assassination.(32)

While the FBI Domestic Intelligence Division had some of the most
sophisticated investigators and resources at its disposal, the committee
concurred with the conclusion of the Senate select committee when
it stated in 1976:"Rather than addressing its investigation to all
significant circumstances, including all possibilities of conspiracy, the
FBI investigation focused narrowly on Lee Harvey Oswald."(33)

The committee further concluded that the critical early period of
the FBI's investigation was conducted in an atmosphere of considerable
haste and pressure from Hoover to conclude the investigation in
an unreasonably short period of time. (34) The committee also noted
that Hoover's personal predisposition that Oswald had been a lone
assassin affected the course of the investigation, adding to the momentum
to conclude the investigation after limited consideration of possible
conspiratorial areas. While Hoover continued to press conspiracy
leads, his apparent attitude was reflected in a telephone conversation
with President Johnson on November 24, 1963, just hours after Oswald
had been shot of death by Ruby. Hoover said:"The thing I am most
concerned about ...is having something issued so we can convince
the public that Oswald is the real assassin."(35) Two days later, on
November 26, 1963, Hoover received a memorandum from an assistant
director stating that, "...we must recognize that a matter of this
magnitude cannot be fully investigated in a week's time."(36) In a
notation on the memo, indicating his impatience, Hoover jotted:"Just
how long do you estimate it will take. It seems to me we have the basic
facts now."(37) Three days later, on November 29, in a memorandum
regarding a conversation he had with President Johnson earlier that
day, Hoover stated:

I advised the President that we hope to have the investigation
wrapped up today, but probably won't have it before the
first of the week, due to an additional lead being pursued in
Mexico.(38)

The committee also concurred with other House and Senate committees
that the FBI failed to cooperate fully with the Warren Commission.
The committee found the Bureau's relationship with the
Commission to have been distinctly adversarial and that there were
limited areas in which the FBI did not provide complete information
to the Commission and other areas in which the Bureau's information
was misleading. (39) An entry from Oswald's notebook containing
the name, address and phone number of an FBI agent in Dallas
for example, was initially withheld from the Warren Commission (40)
In addition, the same special agent in Dallas destroyed a note he had
received, apparently from Oswald, within 2 weeks of the assassination. (41)
The note, in which Oswald reportedly threatened the agent,
(42) was flushed down a toilet several hours after Oswald was mur-

Page 245

dered by Ruby. The existence of the note was also withheld from the
Warren Commission and did not come to light for over 12 years. (43)

Warren Commission General Counsel J. Lee Rankin addressed
himself to instances of FBI misconduct in testimony before the
committee:

...it just raises doubt about the way our government has
been conducted and the fact that it seems to be more important
to people that they protect their particular agency
or bureau than their own country. It does not prove that
there was ever a conspiracy. By that I mean conspiracy to kill
President Kennedy. But there may have been a conspiracy as
far as the Commission was concerned, and what they were
going to do to it, and it has worked. (44)

The committee also found that the FBI was deficient in failing to
inform the Warren Commission that a number of Bureau officials
had been disciplined by Hoover for deficiencies in the security investigation
of Oswald prior to the assassination. (45) These same officials
were subsequently assigned to the post-assassination investigation of
Oswald and the possible conspiratorial involvement of others. Hoover
had ordered an investigation shortly after the assassination to determine
whether Bureau personnel had adequately probed Oswald's
potential for subversive actions or violence and whether he should have
been listed on the Bureau's security index. (46) The FBI Inspection
Division concluded that there had been numerous deficiencies in the
preassassination investigation and recommended various forms of
disciplinary action or censure for five field agents, one field supervisor,
three special agents-in-charge, four headquarters supervisors,
two headquarters section chiefs, one inspector, and one assistant
director. (47)

Subsequently, Hoover did in fact carry out most of the disciplinary
actions recommended. A former assistant director stated that such
action was taken in strict secrecy so that the Warren Commission
would not become aware of the deficiencies. The committee found that
Hoover's action in ordering the official disciplining (48) of some of
these personnel went beyond what was justified, and that the Bureau's
preassassination security investigation of Lee Harvey Oswald had
been adequate.3 Nevertheless, the circumstances of such disciplinary
action should have been communicated to the Warren Commission,
particularly since a number of the personnel disciplined
participated in the assassination investigation.

The committee determined further that in several instances Hoover's
pledge to the Warren Commission that the FBI would continue to
investigate information it received in years to come on the President's
murder was not kept. The committee found specific cases in which
the Bureau did not follow up on such information provided to it. (49)
Two examples relate to leads received from underworld sources.

3The committee examined the basis for this disciplinary
action and found the action to have been unwarranted. The actions of the agents involved
were appropriate under the circumstances as they knew them. That Oswald turned out to be an
assassin should not have been used to fault the agents, since they had no reason to suspect that would be
the case when they were dealing with him. If the agents were to be faulted in Oswald's case,
they would have to have been faulted in all similar cases, and the Bureau's conduct in
security matters would have to be radically altered.

Page 246

In the first instance, the Bureau received information from Chief
Justice Warren regarding organized crime figure John Roselli's claim
of personal knowledge relating to Cuban or underworld complicity.
The Bureau declined to investigate the information and did not take
any action until President Johnson personally intervened. (50) In the
second instance, the Bureau received information from a source in
1967 regarding a reported meeting at which New Orleans Mafia leader
Carlos Marcello had allegedly made a threat against the life of President
Kennedy. (51) Rather than investigating the information, Bureau
personnel took repeated action to discredit the source. (52)

To summarize, the committee found that the Bureau performed with
varying degrees of competency in the investigation of the President's
death. Its investigation into the complicity of Lee Harvey Oswald
prior to and after the assassination was thorough and professional.
Nevertheless, it failed to conduct an adequate investigation into the
possibility of a conspiracy in key areas, and it was deficient in its
sharing of information with the Warren Commission.

Created by the National Security Act of 1947,(1) the CIA was, in
fact, a postwar outgrowth of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).
The head of OSS, though never a CIA official, was William J. Donovan,
who in World War II adopted the British approach of combining
the intelligence activities of various agencies into one office.

Toward the end of World War II, President Roosevelt sought Donovan's
advice on a permanent intelligence apparatus. Donovan's
classified reply, leaked to the press 3 months later, described an "all-powerful
intelligence service... [which] would supersede all existing
Federal police and intelligence units."(2) The reaction
among the heads of existing intelligence and investigative agencies was
predictably negative. Few wanted to see the OSS become more
powerful.

President Roosevelt's death turned out to be a serious blow to
OSS nearly crippling, for President Truman abolished the wartime
agency without consulting Donovan or the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As a
result, the United States was handicapped by a serious intelligence
gap in immediate postwar international struggles.

Unification of the Armed Forces was the main objective of the 1947
act. It also created the National Security Council, of which the CIA
was to be the intelligence coordinating unit. Under the act, the CIA
was charged with four responsibilities:

To advise the NSC on intelligence matters relating to national security;
To make recommendations on the coordination of intelligence activities;
To correlate, evaluate and disseminate intelligence; and

Page 247

To engage in additional intelligence activities and national
security functions at the direction of the NSC.

The Agency was given no law enforcement functions.

In its early years, the CIA was hampered by internal organizational
difficulties and bad relationships with other agencies. The turnover of
directors was rather rapid--Lt. Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg in 1946,
Adm. Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter in 1947, Lt. Gen. Walter Bedell Smith in
1950, Allen W. Dulles in 1952.

Dulles, who had been a wartime master spy, had strong opinions as
to the type of men who should be named to top posts in the Agency.
At Senate Armed Services Committee hearings on the National Security
Act, he testified that the CIA:

...should be directed by a relatively small but elite
corps of men with a passion for anonymity and a willingness
to stick at that particular job. They must find their reward in
the work itself, and in the service they render their Government,
rather than in public acclaim. (3)

In addition, in its formative period the CIA was subjected to the
harangues of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, who demanded a purge of
Agency personnel. The upshot was a severe tightening of employment
standards, as well as a restriction within the Agency on the expression
of political viewpoints.

Although the CIA is not required to make public its organizational
structure, it is known to consist of five main entities--the Office of the
Director and four Directorates. The Director and Deputy Director,
only one of whom may be a military officer, are appointed by the
President. The four Directorates are as follows:

The Directorate of Operations--the clandestine services unit,
which is comprised of a number of geographical operating divisions
supplemented by functional staffs.
The Directorate of Intelligence--its responsibility is to analyze
and then synthesize raw intelligence information into finished intelligence
products.
The Directorate of Science and Technology--it is responsible
for basic research and development; it operates technical systems
and analyzes highly technical information.
The Directorate of Administration-- the Agency's housekeeping department.

At one time there were also a number of proprietary organizations,
front groups and social or political institutions that were run by the
CIA or on its behalf. The best known proprietaries were Radio Free
Europe and Radio Liberty, both established in the early 1950's. Among
the front organizations were airlines and holding companies to support
clandestine operations. In early 1967, it was learned that the CIA had
for years been subsidizing the country's largest student organization,
the National Student Association. Eventually, it became known that
the Agency had channeled money to a number of business, labor, religious,
charitable, and educational organizations.

In 1974 and 1975, in response to charges that the CIA had engaged
in large-scale spying on American citizens and had compiled
dossiers on many citizens, a commission headed by Vice President
Rockefeller investigated whether domestic CIA activities exceeded the Agency's
statutory authority. Mail intercepts, infiltration of dissident groups,
illegal wiretaps and break-ins were among the subjects of the investigation.

The Rockefeller Commission concluded that the "great majority of
the CIA's domestic activities comply with its statutory authority...
Nevertheless, over the 28 years of its history, the CIA has engaged in
some activities that should be criticized and not permitted to happen
again--both in light of the limits imposed on the Agency by law and
as a matter of public policy." (4)

As the committee examined the Agency's role in the investigation
of the death of the President, it focused its investigation in these areas:

The Agency's handling of the Oswald case prior to the assassination;
CIA support of the Warren Commission investigation; and
Developments relevant to the Kennedy assassination after publication of the Warren report.

The committee's investigation proceeded on the basis of interviews,
depositions and hearings. Evidence was received from present and
former CIA officials and employees, as well as members and staff attorneys
of the Warren Commission. The CIA personnel who testified or
were interviewed were assured in writing by the Acting Director of
Central Intelligence that their secrecy obligation to the CIA was not in
effect with respect to questions relevant to the committee's inquiry. (5)

To the extent possible, the committee pursued investigative leads by interviewing
Cuban and Mexican citizens. Further, an extensive review
of CIA and FBI files on Oswald's activities outside of the United
States was undertaken. The CIA materials made available to the committee
were examined in unabridged form. (6)

Much of the information obtained by the committee came from present
and former officials and employees of the CIA and dealt with sensitive
sources and methods of the Agency. Since these sources and
methods are protected by law from unauthorized disclosure, this report
of the CIA investigation was written with the intention of not disclosing them.
Much of what is presented is, therefore, necessarily conclusionary,
since detailed analysis would have required revealing sensitive and
classified sources and methods.1

An individual identified as Lee Harvey Oswald came to the attention
of the CIA in the fall of 1963 when he made a trip to Mexico City. The
committee examined the efforts of the CIA to determine the true identity
of the individual, the nature of his visit to Mexico and with whom,
if anyone, he might have associated while there.

CIA headquarters in Washington, D.C., was informed on October 9,
1963, that a person who identified himself as Oswald had contacted

1Staff studies reflecting a comprehensive examination of the issues and containing
pertinent information and analysis were classified and stored at the National Archives.

Page 249

the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City on October 1, 1963. Headquarters
was also advised that Oswald had spoken with an individual possibly
identified as Soviet Consul Kostikov on September 28, 1963, and that
a photograph, apparently of an American, had been obtained. This
photograph, which was thought to be a positive identification of
Oswald, did not purport to be a positive identification of him. The subject
of the photograph was described as approximately 35 years old,
6 feet tall, with an athletic build, a balding top, and receding hairline.(7)

During October 1963, 2 CIA intelligence sources abroad determined
that Oswald had visited the Soviet Embassy or the Cuban consulate in
Mexico City at least 5 times for the purpose of obtaining an intransit
visa to Russia via Cuba.(8) Once CIA headquarters determined
that Oswald was a former defector to the Soviet Union, his
activity in Mexico City was considered to be potentially significant by
both headquarters personnel and CIA intelligence sources abroad. (9)
Headquarters, however, was not informed about Oswald's visa request
nor of his visits to the Cuban consulate. As a result, while other interested
Federal agencies were apprised of Oswald's contact with the
Soviet Embassy, they were not informed about his visa request or of
his visit to the Cuban consulate. (10)

The committee considered the possibility that an imposter visited
the Soviet Embassy or Cuban consulate during one or more of the contacts
in which Oswald was identified by the CIA. This suspicion arose,
at least in part because the photograph obtained by the CIA in October
1963 was shown after the assassination by the FBI to Oswald's
mother as possibly showing her son. (Mrs. Oswald maintained the
person in the picture was her son's killer, Jack Ruby.) (11) In addition
the description, based on the photograph, that the CIA had received
in its first report of Oswald's contact with the Soviet
Embassy in Mexico City, in fact bore no resemblance to Oswald,(12) The man
in the photograph was clearly neither Oswald nor Ruby, and the CIA
and FBI were unable (as was the committee) to establish the identity
of the individual in the photograph. The overwhelming weight of the
evidence indicated to the committee that the initial conclusion of
Agency employees that the individual in the photograph was Oswald
was the result of a careless mistake. It was not, the committee believed,
because the individual was posing as Oswald. In fact, the committee
established that the photograph was not even obtained at a time when
Oswald was reported to have visited the Soviet Embassy in Mexico
City.(13)

The question of an Oswald imposter was also raised in an FBI
letterhead memorandum to the Secret Service dated November 23,
1963. It was based in part upon information received by CIA headquarters
on October 9, 1963, that on October 1, 1963, Oswald had contacted
the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City:

The Central Intelligence Agency advised that on October 1,
1963, an extremely sensitive source had reported that an individual
identified himself as Lee Oswald, who contacted the

2The Agency maintained that prior to the assassination, its
field sources had not actually linked Oswald to the person who visited the Cuban consulate in
October 1963. Testimony obtained directly from these sources, however, established that this connection had in
fact been made in early October 1963.

Page 250

Soviet Embassy in Mexico City inquiring as to any messages.
Special Agents of this Bureau, who have conversed with Oswald
in Dallas, Tex., have observed photographs of the individual
referred to above and have listened to a recording of
his voice. These Special Agents are of the opinion that the
above-referred-to individual was not Lee Harvey Oswald.(14)

In response to it committee inquiry, the FBI reported that no tape
recording of Oswald's voice was in fact ever received. The Bureau
explained that its Dallas office only received the report of a conversation
to which Oswald had been a party. This explanation was independently
confirmed by the committee. A review of relevant FBI cable
traffic established that at 7:23 p.m. (CST) on November 23, 1963,
Dallas Special Agent-in-Charge Shanklin advised Director Hoover
that only a report of this conversation was available, not an actual
tape recording. On November 25, the Dallas office again apprised
the Director that "[t]here appears to be some confusion in that no
tapes were taken to Dallas ...[O]nly typewritten [reports were]
supplied ...."(15)

Shanklin stated in a committee interview that no recording was ever
received by FBI officials in Dallas. (16) Moreover, former FBI Special
Agents James Hosty, John W. Fain, Burnett Tom Carter, and Arnold
J. Brown, each of whom had conversed with Oswald at one time, informed
the committee they had never listened to a recording of
Oswald's voice.3(17)

Finally, on the basis of an extensive file review and detailed testimony
by present and former CIA officials and employees, the committee
determined that CIA headquarters never received a recording of
Oswald's voice.(18) The committee concluded, therefore, that the information
in the November 23, 1963, letterhead memorandum was
mistaken and did not provide a basis for concluding that there had
been an Oswald imposter.

The committee did, however, obtain independent evidence that
someone might have posed as Oswald in Mexico in late September
and early October 1963. The former Cuban consul in Mexico City,
Eusebio Azcue, testified that the man who applied for an
in-transit visa to the Soviet Union was not the one who was identified as Lee
Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President Kennedy on November
1963. Azcue, who maintained that he had dealt on three occasions in
Mexico with someone who identified himself as Oswald, described the
man he claimed was an imposter as a 30-year-old white male, about 5
feet 6 inches in height, with a long face and a straight and pointed
nose.(19)

In addition, the committee interviewed Silvia Duran, a secretary in
the Cuban consulate in 1963. Although she said that it was in fact
Oswald who had visited the consulate on three occasions, she described
him as 5 feet 6, 125 pounds, with sparse blond hair, features that did
not match those of Lee Harvey Oswald. (20) The descriptions given
by both Azcue and Duran do bear a resemblance--height aside--to an

3The committee did not contact the three other FBI special
agents who had also conversed with Oswald at one time.

Page 251

alleged Oswald associate referred to in an unconfirmed report provided
by another witness, Elena Garro de Paz, former wife of the
noted Mexican poet, Octavio Paz. Elena Garro described the associate,
whom she claimed to have seen with Oswald at a party, as very tall
and slender [with] ...long blond hair ...a gaunt face [and] a
rather long protruding chin." 4(21)

Two other points warranted further investigation of the imposter
issue. The Oswald who contacted the Russian and Cuban diplomatic
compounds reportedly spoke broken, hardly recognizable Russian, yet
there is considerable evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald was relatively
fluent in this language. (22) In addition, Silvia Duran told the committee
that Oswald was not at the Cuban consulate on September
1963, a day the consulate was closed to the public. (23) The committee
obtained reliable evidence of a sensitive nature from another source,
however, that a person who identified himself as Oswald met with
Duran at the consulate that day. (24)

The imposter issue could, of course, have been easily resolved had
photographs of the person or persons in question been taken at the
entrance to the Cuban consulate and Soviet Embassy. The Cuban
Government maintained to the committee that the Cuban consulate
was under photographic surveillance. In fact, the Cuban Government
provided the committee with photographs of the alleged surveillance
camera location.(25) The committee had other reports that the CIA
had obtained a picture of Oswald that was taken during at least one
of his visits to the Soviet Embassy and Cuban consulates.(26) The
CIA, however, denied that such a photograph had been obtained, and
no such pictures of Oswald were discovered by the committee during
its review of the Agency's files. (27)

Despite the unanswered questions, the weight of the evidence supported
the conclusion that Oswald was the individual who visited the
Soviet Embassy and Cuban consulate. Silvia Duran, who dealt with
Oswald at three different times, told the committee she was certain that
the individual who applied for an in-transit visa to Russia via Cuba
was Oswald. (28) She specifically identified the individual in the
photograph on Oswald's visa application form as the Lee Harvey Oswald
who had visited the Cuban consulate. (29) Moreover, Duran stated that
Oswald's visa application was signed in her presence. (30)

Duran's statements were corroborated by Alfredo Mirabal who
succeeded Azcue as Cuban consul in Mexico City in 1963. Mirabal
testified that on two occasions, from a distance of 4 meters, he
had observed Oswald at the Cuban consulate and that this was the same
person who was later photographed being shot by Jack Ruby. (31)
Further, the committee was given access by the Cuban Government to
Oswald's original visa application, a carbon copy of which had been
supplied to the Warren Commission. Testimony before the committee
established that each of these forms had been signed separately.(32)
The application papers were photographed, and the signature on them
was then studied by the committee's panel of handwriting experts. The
panel's analysis indicated that the signature on both forms was that of
Lee Harvey Oswald.5(33) Finally, reliable evidence of a sensitive
nature provided to the committee by the CIA tended to indicate that

4Elena Garro's allegation is discussed in more detail in section I C 2, supra.

5Cuban Consul Azcue indicated to the committee that consulate practice
in 1963 prohibited applications from being removed from the consulate premises to be filled out
elsewhere. Silvia Duran stated, however, that applications could be filled out elsewhere.

Page 252

the person who contacted the Soviet Embassy was the same Lee
Harvey Oswald who had visited the Cuban consulate. (34)

It can be said that the fact that the Agency's field sources noted
Oswald's movements outside the United States was an indication of
effective intelligence work. Nevertheless, the CIA's handling of the
Oswald case prior to the assassination was deficient because CIA headquarters
was not apprised of all information that its field sources had
gathered with respect to Oswald, and headquarters, in turn, was thereby
prevented from relaying a more complete resume of Oswald's
nations in Mexico City to the FBI, which was charged with responsibility
for the Oswald security case.

The committee was unable to determine whether the CIA did in fact
come into possession of a photograph of Oswald taken during his visits
to the Soviet Embassy and Cuban consulate in Mexico City, or
whether Oswald had any associates in Mexico City. Nevertheless, other
information provided by the CIA, as well as evidence obtained from
Cuban and Mexican sources, enabled the committee to conclude that
the individual who represented himself as Lee Harvey Oswald at the
Cuban consulate in Mexico was not an imposter.

(2) The CIA and the Warren Commission.--
The CIA took the position that it was not to conduct a police-type investigation of
the assassination of President Kennedy. According to the testimony of
former Director Richard M. Helms, its role was to provide support for
the Warren Commission's effort by responding to specific inquiries.
(35) Nevertheless, because the CIA was the Commission's primary
source of information beyond U.S. territorial limits with respect to
the question of foreign complicity in the assassination, the committee
sought to evaluate both the quality of the CIA's handling of the foreign
conspiracy question and the Agency's working relationship with
the Commission. 6

The Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations
with Respect to Intelligence Activities also studied the performance of
the intelligence agencies in conducting their investigation of the assassination
and their relationship with the Warren Commission. The
Senate committee's report emphasized the Agency's failure to pursue
certain leads to a possible Cuban conspiracy or to apprise the Warren
Commission of CIA assassination plots against Fidel Castro. (36) In
response, the CIA prepared a Task Force Report (1977 TFR) on the
accuracy of the Senate committee's analysis. In its investigation, the
committee reviewed the 1977 TFR7 and used it as a starting point in
assessing the timeliness and effectiveness of the CIA's responses to the
Warren Commission's periodic requests for information.(37)

The CIA investigation of the Kennedy assassination was focused at
the outset on Oswald's trip to Mexico. It was managed at Washington
headquarters by the desk officer responsible for intelligence activity
related to Mexico. Immediately following the assassination the desk
officer was instructed by Richard Helms, then Deputy Director for

6Results of the committee's investigations of how effectively the
CIA pursued the question of foreign complicity can be found in sections II C 1 and 2.

7For the committee's analysis of the significance of information that the
CIA failed to provide the Warren Commission, see section I C 2.

Page 253

Plans, to coordinate efforts to compile and evaluate incoming information
pertaining to the assassination. The desk officer was assigned this
responsibility due to his past experience conducting internal CIA
security investigations and because Oswald had visited Mexico
months prior to the assassination.(38) The cable traffic this officer
coordinated was voluminous.

By late December 1963, it had become apparent that the CIA's
interest in information related to the assassination had extended beyond
Oswald's trip to Mexico. It encompassed Oswald's defection to
the Soviet Union as well as the possible involvement of foreign powers
in an assassination conspiracy. Consequently, responsibility for coordinating
CIA investigative efforts was shifted to the counterintelligence
staff, which had worldwide resources and expertise in investigating
sabotage, guerrilla activities and counterespionage. (39)

The second phase of the Agency information collection effort, designed
principally to respond to the work of the Warren Commission,
was coordinated by Raymond Rocca, Chief of Research and Analysis
(CI/R & A) for the counterintelligence staff. CI/R & A was the
counterintelligence staff component particularly concerned with research
and analysis related to counterintelligence and the formulation of
policy based on the analysis. Rocca was the CIA's working-level contact
point with the Warren Commission; consequently he was in a
position to review most CIA information pertaining to the assassination,
which comprised a heavy volume of incoming cable traffic. (40)
Due to compartmentalization, however, Rocca did not have access to
all materials potentially relevant to the Warren Commission investigation.
For example, Rocca had no knowledge of efforts by the CIA to
assassinate Fidel Castro in the early 1960's. (41)

An examination of the functioning of the Warren Commission
indicated to the committee that its staff assumed the CIA would
expeditiously provide it with all relevant information rather than
merely furnish data in response to specific requests.(42) An analysis
by the committee showed that the Warren Commission's view was not
shared by certain high-ranking officials of the Agency, including
Deputy Director Helms. In fact, the CIA did not always respond to
the Commission's broad request for all relevant material. In testimony
to the committee, Helms said the CIA's general position was
that it should forward information to the Commission only in response
to specific requests. (43) Helms indicated that he did not inform the
Warren Commission of the anti-Castro plots because he was never
"asked to testify before the Warren Commission about ...[CIA]
operations." (44) This attitude caused, in the view of the Senate committee,
an interpretation of the Warren Commission investigation
that was too narrow in scope. (45)8

8The committee agreed that this was an unacceptable explanation for
the CIA's failure to inform the Warren Commission of the anti-Castro plots. It was apparent that the
Commission was unable to make a specific request for information about the plots since it was
unaware of their existence. In this regard, the observations of the Senate committee are worth quoting:

"Why senior officials of the FBI and the CIA permitted the investigation to go forward,
in light of these deficiencies, and why they permitted the Warren Commission to reach its
conclusion without all relevant information is still unclear. Certainly, concern with public
reputation, problems of coordination between agencies, possible bureaucratic failure and embarrassment, and the
extreme compartmentation of knowledge of sensitive operations may have contributed to these shortcomings. But the
possibility exists that senior officials in both agencies made conscious decisions not to disclose
potentially important information."

Page 254

The CIA also failed to provide the Warren Commission with all
information in its possession pertaining to Luisa Calderon, a Cuban
consulate employee in Mexico City suspected of having ties to the
Cuban intelligence service. Calderon, who was alleged in 1964 by a
Cuban defector to have been in contact with an American who might
have been Oswald during the period of time of Oswald's visit to
Mexico City, engaged in a conversation approximately 5 hours after
the assassination in which she indicated possible foreknowledge of the
assassination. 9 The Warren Commission, however, was not apprised
by the CIA of this conversation. (The CIA was unable to explain the
omission, but the committee uncovered no evidence to suggest that it
was due to anything but careless oversight.) (47)

With the exception of that which was obtained from sensitive sources
and methods, CIA information, in general, was accurately and expeditiously
provided to the Warren Commission. In cases of sensitive
sources and methods, rather than provide the Commission with raw
data that would have meant revealing the sources and methods, the
substance of the information was submitted in accurate summary
form.(48)

As a case in point, the committee determined that within two days
of the President's assassination, CIA headquarters received
detailed reports of Oswald's contacts with the Soviet Embassy and Cuban
consulate in Mexico City in late September and early October 1963.
(49) Accurate summaries of this material were given to the Warren Commission
on January 31, 1964, but direct access to the original material
(which would have revealed sources and methods that were sensitive)
was not provided until April 1964, when Warren Commission investigators
traveling abroad met with a CIA representative who provided
it to them. (50) One Warren Commission staff member who reviewed
the original material wrote an April 22, 1964, in a memorandum, which
indicated the impact of this material:

[The CIA representative's] narrative plus the material we
were shown disclosed immediately how incorrect our previous
information had been on Oswald's contacts with the Soviet
and Cuban Embassies [in Mexico City.] Apparently, the distortions
and omissions to which our information had been
subjected had entered some place in Washington, because the
CIA information that we were shown by [the CIA representative]
was unambiguous on almost all the crucial points. We
had previously planned to show the [CIA representative]
[Commission Assistant Counsel W. David] Slawson's reconstruction
of Oswald's probable activities at the Embassies to
get [his] opinion, but once we saw how badly distorted our
information was we realized that this would be useless. Therefore,
instead, we decided to take as close notes as possible from
the original source materials at some later time during our
visit.(51)

9The substance of that conversation is covered in section I C 2
on a possible Cuban conspiracy. The CIA maintained that the original Agency report summarizing this conversation
was inaccurately translated and that, when accurately translated, it was apparent that there was no basis for sending the original
conversation to the Warren Commission. The committee, however, considered the CIA's revised translation
of the report and did not regard it as definitive. Moreover, even if the Agency's revised translation were accepted, the
substance of the report remained essentially unchanged. Accordingly, using either translation as the basis for analysis, the Warren Commission should have been
apprised of this conversation.

Page 255

The committee did note that these distortions may have merely been
the product of the staff member's inaccurate analysis of the available
material, since the record reflected that he had reviewed a CIA memorandum
dated January 31, 1964, that accurately summarized these
records. (52) Nevertheless, as a result of his direct review of the
original source materials, he was able to clarify considerably his
analysis of Oswald's activities in Mexico City.

Another instance in which the CIA's concern for protecting its
sensitive sources and methods resulted in delayed access by the Warren
Commission had to do with a photograph that was referred to when
CIA headquarters was informed on October 9, 1963, that Oswald had
contacted the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. The photograph was
described as apparently depicting an American initially believed by
some CIA personnel to be Oswald.(53) It was also the photograph
that was apparently shown to Marguerite Oswald after the
assassination. (54)

The circumstances of the photograph's origin as well as the fact
that the individual in the photograph bore no resemblance to Oswald
were known to the CIA shortly after the assassination. (55) Nevertheless,
the Warren Commission was not told those details by the CIA
until late March 1964. (56)10 The Commission had requested an explanation
of the photograph on February 12, 1964, having inadvertently
learned of its existence from the testimony of Marguerite Oswald. (60)

The committee did not conclude that the CIA's handling of information
derived from sensitive methods and sources, in fact, substantially
impeded the progress of the Warren Commission, but it did
find that the Agency's policy with respect to this information was inconsistent
with the spirit of Executive Order 11130 that "[a]ll executive
departments and agencies are directed to furnish the Commission
with such facilities, services and cooperation as it may request from
time to time."

(3) Post-Warren report CIA investigation--
The committee found that the CIA, as had the FBI, showed little or no inclination to
develop information with respect to the President's assassination once the
Warren Commission had issued its report. Three cases in point that
emerged in the aftermath of the investigation and seemed relevant
enough to warrant more careful consideration than they received have
been described previously in this report.

In the case of Yuri Nosenko, the Soviet defector who claimed that,
as an officer of the KGB, he handled the Oswald file11, the CIA
failed to capitalize on a potential source of critical evidence.
By employing inexperienced interrogators who lacked interest in or
knowledge of Oswald or the assassination, and by subjecting Nosenko
to hostile interrogation, the CIA lost an opportunity to elicit
information that might have shed light on Oswald, his wife Marina,

10One CIA officer indicated that since the photograph was
not of Oswald, there was no need to inform the Warren Commission about it, thereby
jeopardizing a sensitive CIA source and method. (57) Further, CIA documents show that even when the
Commission sought an explanation of the photograph, the Agency's concern for the protection of
its sources and methods inhibited immediate compliance with the request. (58) The committee
believed, nonetheless, that as the photograph was referred to in the first report that CIA
headquarters received on Oswald's contact with the Soviet Embassy, (59) it was directly
relevant to the Warren Commission investigation and should have been made available promptly.

11See section I C 1.

Page 256

and a possible KGB connection to them. In the cases of two Mexican
citizens who claimed to have had contacts with Oswald in Mexico City
in the fall of 1963, Elena Garro de Paz and Oscar Contreras,12 the
CIA took only perfunctory action, consequently failing to gain insight
into actions by Oswald that might have had a bearing on the
assassination.

5. The Warren Commission Performed with Varying Degrees of Competency
in the Fulfillment of its Duties
Go to the footnotes for this section.
(a) The Warren Commission conducted a thorough and professional
investigation into the responsibility of Lee Harvey Oswald for
the assassination.

(b) The Warren Commission failed to investigate adequately the
possibility of a conspiracy to assassinate the President. This deficiency
was attributable in part to the failure of the commission to receive
all the relevant information that was in the possession of
other agencies and departments of the Government.

(c) The Warren Commission arrived at its conclusions, based on the evidence
available to it, in good faith.

(d) The Warren Commission presented the conclusions in its report
in a fashion that was too definitive

President John F. Kennedy was the fourth American President to
be assassinated, but his death was the first that led to the formation of
a special commission for the purpose of making a full investigation.

In earlier assassinations, the investigations had been left to existing
judicial bodies:

In the case of Abraham Lincoln in 1865, a military commission
determined that John Wilkes Booth was part of a conspiracy, and
the Office of the Judge Advocate General of the U.S. Army saw
to the prosecution of six defendants, four of whom were hanged.
The assassins of James A. Garfield in 1881 and William McKinley in
1901 were promptly tried in courts of law and executed.

In the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, it was decided by
President Lyndon B. Johnson and his advisers that a panel of distinguished
citizens should be given the responsibility for finding the full
facts of the case and reporting them, along with appropriate recommendations,
to the American people.

The Commission was authorized by Executive Order 11130 to set
its own procedures and to employ whatever assistance it deemed necessary
from Federal agencies, all of which were ordered to cooperate to
the maximum with the Commission, which had, under an act of Congress,
subpoena power and the authority to grant immunity to witnesses
who claimed their privilege against self-incrimination under the fifth
amendment.(1)

Chief Justice Earl Warren was selected by President Johnson to
head the Commission. Two senior Members of the Senate, Richard B.
Russell, Democrat of Georgia, and John Sherman Cooper, Republican
Kentucky, were chosen to serve on the Commission, as were two
from the House of Representatives, Hale Boggs, Democrat of Louisiana,
and Gerald Ford, Republican of Michigan. Two attorneys who

12See section I C 2.

Page 257

had long been active in Government service, Allen W. Dulles, former
Director of the CIA, and John J. McCloy, former president of the
World Bank, were also named.(2) J. Lee Rankin, former Solicitor
General of the United States, was sworn in as General Counsel on
December 16, 1963, and 14 attorneys were appointed within a few
weeks to serve as assistant counsel. (3)

The Commission did not employ its own investigative staff. Instead,
it relied on agencies in place---the FBI and Secret Service for domestic
aspects, the CIA for activities involving foreign countries.

In September 1964, following a 9-month effort, the Warren Commission
published a report that not only included its conclusions and
recommendations, but also a detailed analysis of the case. The Commission
had seen its task to be:

...to uncover all the facts concerning the assassination
of President Kennedy and to determine if it was in any way
directed or encouraged by unknown persons at home or
abroad.

While the committee concluded that the Warren Commission failed
in significant areas to investigate "all the facts and circumstances"
surrounding the tragic events in Dallas, the committee also found
that assigning the responsibility for that failure needed to be approached
with utmost caution and care. In large measure, the Warren
Commission's inadequacies in investigating important aspects of the
President's assassination were the result of failures by the CIA and
the FBI to provide it with all relevant evidence and information. (4)

It has been the contention of the CIA and FBI that they gave full
and complete responses to all specific requests of the Warren Commission,
placing responsibility with the Commission for assuming it would
receive the relevant materials automatically. (5) This apparent misunderstanding,
in the view of the committee, compromised the effectiveness
of the process by which the Warren Commission arrived at its
conclusions.

The committee observed that during the course of its hearings, numerous
former Warren Commission members and staff attorneys testified
that the general atmosphere of Government had changed during
the years since President Kennedy's death. They repeatedly noted
that they had been significantly more disposed toward trusting the
CIA and FBI in 1963 and 1964 than they would have been in 1978. (6)

As it began to prepare its report on the performance of the Warren
Commission, the committee took note of the high level of professionalism,
dedication, and integrity it found to have characterized the members
and staff of the Commission. The committee noted that criticisms
leveled at the Commission had often been biased, unfair, and inaccurate.
Indeed, the committee believed that the prevailing opinion of
the Commission's performance was undeserved. The competence
of the Commission was all the more impressive, in the opinion of the
committee, in view of the substantial pressure to elicit findings in only
9 months.(7) It was evident to the committee that the Commission
could have productively used several more months for its investigation,
although the committee recognized that this was a judgment
based on the benefit of years of hindsight.

Page 258

Nevertheless, the committee made the judgment that the time
pressures under which the Warren Commission investigation was conducted
served to compromise the work product and the conclusions of the
Commission. (8) Early in the life of the Commission, it was working
under internal deadlines of March or April 1964 for completion of the
investigation, June 1 for a draft report and June 30 for a final report
to the American public. Although these deadlines were finally abandoned,
the committee found that the Commission staff was in fact under heavy
pressure to meet them. President Johnson, among others in his administration,
was anxious to have the investigation completed in advance
of the 1964 Presidential conventions, out of concern that the assassination
could become a political issue. (9)

The committee also found that most of the attorneys recruited for
the Commission staff were promised their work would require no more
than 3 or 4 months. Additionally, a number of lawyers were hired on
a part-time basis. (10) Eventually, the realities of the task began to be
apparent.

It was not until March that staff attorneys did any real field work
in Dallas and elsewhere, and it was the middle of March before an investigation
of Jack Ruby could get underway, since he was on trial for
murder in Dallas. Nevertheless, a number of senior staff counsel, those
who directed important areas of the case, left their jobs with the Commission
by early summer 1964, over 4 months before the investigation
officially ended. (11)

The committee found that the Commission demonstrated a high
degree of competency and good judgment in its central determination
that Lee Harvey Oswald was the assassin of President Kennedy. (12)
Contrary to the allegations of some critics, the Commission was not
part of a sinister Government coverup of the truth. The committee
found that the Commission acted in good faith, and the mistakes it
made were those of men doing their best under difficult circumstances.

That being said, on the subject that should have received the Commission's
most probing analysis--whether Oswald acted in concert
with or on behalf of unidentified co-conspirators the Commission's
performance, in the view of the committee, was in fact flawed.(13)
In its effort to fix responsibility for this failure, the committee, as
noted, found one of the primary causes was the absence of the full and
proper cooperation of the FBI and the CIA, along with the time pressures
and the desire of national leaders to allay public fears of a
conspiracy.(14)

Virtually all former Warren Commission members and staff contacted
by the committee said they regarded the CIA-Mafia plots
against Fidel Castro to be the most important information withheld
from the Commission. (15) They all agreed that an awareness of the
plots would have led to significant new areas of investigation and
would have altered the general approach of the investigation.(16)
J. Lee Rankin, who was the Commission's General Counsel, said he
was outraged on learning in 1975 of the CIA's use of underworld
figures for Castro assassination plots. Rankin stated to the committee:

Certainly ...it would have bulked larger, the conspiracy area
...we would have run out all the various leads and
...it is very possible that we could have come down with a
good many signs of a lead down here to the underworld. (17)

Page 259

Burt W. Griffin, a Commission assistant counsel who directed much
of the investigation of the possible involvement of organized crime
and Cuban exiles, told the committee:

There was no showing that Oswald had any connection
with organized crime. Therefore, there was no reason to think
that simply because Ruby was involved in organized crime,
that this would have been linked to the assassination of the
President.

We needed to fill that in, in some way, but that is why the
Cuban link is so important. If we had known that the CIA
wanted to assassinate Castro, then all of the Cuban motivations that
we were exploring about this made much, much
more sense. If we had further known that the CIA was involved
with organized criminal figures in an assassination attempt
in the Caribbean, then we would have had a completely
different perspective on this thing.

But because we did not have those links at this point, there
was nothing to tie the underworld in with Cuba and thus
nothing to tie them in with Oswald, nothing to tie them in
with the assassination of the President. (18)

Apart from the inability of the Commission to obtain all of the
information it needed from the CIA and FBI, the committee found
inherent inadequacies in its investigation of an assassination conspiracy.(19)
It was, for example, limited in approach and resources.

In the crucial areas of organized crime, Cuban exiles and other
militant groups, and foreign complicity, the attorneys assigned were
lacking in experience and knowledge. Moreover, the committee found
little to indicate that outside experts in these areas were ever consulted
by the Commission.

The committee also discovered certain basic deficiencies in the
capacity of the Commission to investigate effectively the murder of a
President. In the words of a Commission assistant counsel: "The style of
the Commission's own staff ...was not one of criminal investigators."(21)
The committee found, further, that the Commission
consciously decided not to form its own staff of professional
investigators, choosing instead to rely on an analysis by its lawyers of
the investigative reports of Federal agencies, principally the FBI and CIA.
(22) And even though its staff was composed primarily of lawyers,
the Commission did not take advantage of all the legal tools available
to it. An assistant counsel told the committee:"The Commission itself
failed to utilize the instruments of immunity from prosecution
and prosecution for perjury with respect to witnesses whose veracity
it doubted."(23) While the Commission did go beyond the expected
role of traditional fact-finding panels serving a President, its inability
to break out of the mold of such blue-ribbon bodies severely restricted
its effectiveness in investigating the assassination of the President and
the murders of Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit and Lee Harvey
Oswald.

The committee also found fault with the manner in which the conclusions
of the Warren Commission were stated, although the committee
recognized how time and resource limitations might have come into

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play. There were instances, the committee found, in which the conclusions
did not appropriately reflect the efforts undertaken by the
Commission and the evidence before it.(24) In the Warren report,
the Commission overstated the thoroughness of its investigation and
the weight of its evidence in a number of areas, in particular that of
the conspiracy investigation. (25) The Commission did not candidly
enumerate its limitations due to time pressures, inadequate resources
or insufficient information. Instead the language employed in the report
left the impression that issues had been dealt with more thoroughly
than they actually had. This was due in part, according to attorneys
who worked for the Commission, to pressure from Commission members
to couch the report in the strongest language possible. As an
example, the Commission declared in the beginning paragraph of its
conclusions section,

No limitations have been placed on the Commission's inquiry; it
has concluded its own investigation, and all Government agencies have fully
discharged their responsibility to cooperate with the Commission in its investigation. (26)

This, in the opinion of the committee, was an inaccurate portrayal
of the investigation.

On conspiracy, the Commission stated, "...if there is any ... evidence [of it], it has been
beyond the reach of all the investigative
agencies and resources of the United States and has not come to the
attention of this Commission."(27) Instead of such definitive language,
the Commission should have candidly acknowledged the limitations of
its investigation and denoted areas where there were
shortcomings.

As the committee's investigation demonstrated, substantive new information
has been developed in many areas since the Warren Commission
completed its work. Particular areas where the committee determined the
performance of the Commission was less than complete
include the following:

Oswald's activities and associations during the periods he lived
in New Orleans;
The circumstances surrounding the 2 1/2 years Oswald spent in the Soviet Union;
The background, activities, and associations of Jack Ruby, particularly with regard to organized crime;
The conspiratorial and potentially violent climate created by the Cuban issue in the early 1960's, in particular
the possible consequences of the CIA-Mafia assassination plots against Castro
and their concealment from officials of the Kennedy administration;
The potential significance of specific threats identified by the
Secret Service during 1963, and their possible relationship to the
ultimate assassination of the President;
The possible effect upon the FBI's investigation from Director
Hoover's disciplining agents for their conduct of the Oswald
security case;
The full nature and extent of Oswald's visit to Mexico City 2
months prior to the assassination, including not only his contact

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with the Soviet and Cuban diplomatic offices there, and the CIA's
monitoring of his activities there, but also his possible associations
and activities outside of those offices;
The violent attitude of powerful organized crime figures toward
the President and Attorney General Robert Kennedy, their capacity
to commit murder, including assassination, and their possible
access to Oswald through his associates or relatives; and
Analysis of all available scientific evidence to determine the
number of shots fired at the President.

In conclusion, the committee found that the Warren Commission's
investigation was conducted in good faith, competently, and with high
integrity, but that the Warren Report was not, in some respects, an
accurate presentation of all the evidence available to the Commission
or a true reflection of the scope of the Commission's work, particularly
on the issue of possible conspiracy in the assassination. It is a
reality to be regretted that the Commission failed to live up to its
promise.

Bibliographic note: Web version based on the Report of the Select Committee on Assassinations of the
U.S. House of Representatives, Washington, DC: United States Government Printing
Office, 1979. 1 volume, 686 pages. The formatting of this Web version may differ from the
original.